Dr. Michael Weiss

 

Chairman of the
Department of biochemistry
at case Western Reserve University

 

by Cheyenne Beale, crew 6

 

 

Dr. Michael A. Weiss is a native Clevelander who is making huge strides in the treatment of diabetes.  For the past 25 years he has been working to develop insulin that does not require refrigeration.  By developing heat stable medication, Dr. Weiss will make it possible for many patients to have access to the care they need even if they do not have access to electricity and refrigerators.  His work is improving the lives of patients not only in Cleveland, but around the world. 

 

Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas.  It helps regulate the amount of glucose produced by the human body. A lack of insulin causes a form of diabetes. Likewise, insulin is used to control blood sugar for people who have Type 1 diabetes. When a person has diabetes his or her body doesn’t efficiently make insulin or doesn’t make insulin at all. If a diabetes patient does not take insulin to control the level of glucose in the body it can lead to many other health problems such as organ failure.

 

Diabetes patients take insulin by injecting it into their blood stream. The insulin that diabetes patients inject must be refrigerated in order for it to work. In Africa and other underdeveloped areas, patients with diabetes often have to bury their insulin in the ground to try to keep it cool and out of the sun. Often this did not keep the medications cool enough, and patients had to go without medication when it was ruined by getting too warm. When Dr. Weiss was in Kenya from1980 to 1981 he saw a profound need for medications that would not require refrigeration. However, he didn’t know how to make this possible. One summer with his family young Michael drove to Yellowstone National Park and saw geysers. He later learned that some of the single celled organisms that live in the geysers make up the human body. Basic chemistry of our body makeup can be made heat stable. This gave him the idea to start trying to learn from these organisms in order to create heat stable medications such as insulin.

 

One of Dr. Weiss’s goals now is to get permission from the FDA to test the drug on volunteers here in Cleveland he says it’s more important ethically to test the drug here, to make sure it’s safe and effective. “If it works we want to make arrangements to give it away for free in Sub-Saharan Africa the way AIDS medicine is given away freely, I think I’ll be close to the end of my career when our inventions will be useful around the world. This would be a wonderful capstone to my many years of failure in the lab,” states Dr. Weiss. Dr. Weiss said. He takes students to rural regions of Bangladesh where there is an epidemic of diabetes and poverty.  In certain parts of countries in poverty stricken areas 10 villages share a single refrigerator.

 

Everyone has had successes and failures. Dr. Weiss has had a lot of both in his years in the lab. This shows that the challenges he went through in the lab have helped him get to where he is today. Indeed it takes a massive amount of courage and loyalty to go back to the lab every day and not know whether you are going to move forward in your invention or have to back track. “The key is to be able to go from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm.” explained Dr. Weiss.

 

After 25 years of research he has shown a great amount of perseverance in creating heat stable medications. “We actually have the molecular formulas for this heat stable insulin. And in some cases we have 3 dimensional structures,” he reported. It took a lot of dedication to get to this point. In 18 months he hopes to test this invention.  “In every month we would have learned a century’s worth progress, but every one of those inventions or discoveries needs some individual person with some passion to spend years or decades of his life to do what is just a few sentences in a text book.”  What Dr. Weiss means by this is that people spend a lot of valuable time doing research and work but as much work as they do it only amounts to a few pages in a textbook. Despite this reality, Dr. Weiss represents the many researchers who have worked tirelessly to make advances in medicine and science in order to make people’s lives better.

 

To summarize, Dr. Weiss is playing a huge role in the future of medicine and has very simple advice that can change the way you look at people. His advice to everyone is, “Enjoy all of your friendships. Take time to talk to people.” Mr. Weiss has many outstanding character traits.  He is intelligent, caring, hardworking, and, above all, has astonishing leadership abilities. These character traits and his care for other people have motivated him to create heat stable medications that will improve the lives of countless people around the world.